Show your registered logo on your emails
Verified Mark Certificates (VMCs) are new digital certificates that enable companies to display a verified logo alongside outgoing emails.
BIMI, Brand Indicators for Message Identification, is a method that allows you to attach your company logo to emails. Entrust has been involved in the development work together with the BIMI group and Google in developing the VMC certificate. In July 2021, Google and Entrust announced that Gmail would be the first email system to support the BIMI standard.
Emails that display your organization’s registered trademark will increase the visibility of your organization. The recipient can be sure that they will receive your message from a trusted source and thus increase the credibility and awareness of your brand.
Why VMC?
- The Verified Mark Certificate, or VMC, allows you to send and receive more reliable e-mail messages
- VMC enhances the customer experience because the organization’s logo is verified by a trusted CA and stands out from other messages.
- CA, Certificate Authority, confirms that the logo attached to the email is a registered trademark of that sender.
- The organization goes through the highest level of verification (Extended Validation) according to the CA/Browser Forum rules.
Requirements for VMC
- You need to have the logo with a confirmed registered trademark. Registration to be done in European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) – https://euipo.europa.eu/ohimportal/en or similar
- DMARC, SPF, and DKIM technology with quarantine or reject policy
- High Assurance Verification, EV (Extended Validation)
- Many organizations are already verified to the highest EV level for public certificates and this is a similar process of verifying a company’s legitimacy, domain, and contact person employment
Logo
- Trademarked logo file formatted as an SVG with Tiny (1.2) profile, in a square aspect ratio
VMC verification process
The most important part of planning for the enrollment process is to pre-select the various contacts who will be involved in the verification process and management of the Verified Mark Certificate(s) on behalf of your organization. All the roles except for the Higher Authority can be filled by the same contact within your organization. You will need at least two contacts in total to enroll for a VMC. You will also need to determine which author or sending domains you will be setting BIMI up with Verified Mark Certificates, as you will be required to submit these during the enrollment process. The organization and domain is needed to be verified in Extended Validation (EV) level.
The Account Administrators will receive an email to set up their login credentials to access their Entrust account. After that you need to submit your trademark and logo information to Entrust for VMC verification in ECS portal. Submit your logo image in SVG format. In order to obtain a VMC, the Applicant Representative (must be either Authorization Contact or Contract Signer) must complete the identity verification process.
To issue a VMC, an Account Administrator will need to log in to the Entrust Certificate Services portal and start the issuing process. Administrator will be required to submit the author domain (example.com) for the BIMI record where the VMC will be used. To verify that you have successfully updated your BIMI configuration, enter the BIMI domain in this tool.
